Deeplinks Blog posts about Transparency

In her new podcast, Mystery Show, Starlee Kine launches hilariously meandering investigations into the types of quirky, personal mysteries that, while seemingly inconsequential, tend to eat at the edges of a person’s mind. This week, Starlee pursues the question: what’s the story behind the “ILUV911” vanity license plate she once noticed on the back of a Buick during a really long traffic light a few years back?

Here’s where you deserve a spoiler alert. A big one. (You should listen to "Case #4 Vanity Plate" before proceeding.)

Starlee solves her mystery. But, in the process, she also destroys the chief defense made by the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) industry to counter criticisms that ALPR technology violates personal privacy.

Noted eagle eye and EFF Investigative Researcher Dave Maass happened on an interesting item from earlier this week on FedBizOpps, the site for government agencies to post contracting opportunities. The Navy put up a solicitation explaining that the government wants “access to vulnerability intelligence, exploit reports and operational exploit binaries affecting widely used and relied upon commercial software,” including Microsoft, Adobe, Android, Apple, “and all others.” If that weren’t clear enough, the solicitation explains that “the vendor shall provide the government with a proposed list of available vulnerabilities, 0-day or N-day (no older than 6 months old). . . .The government will select from the supplied list and direct development of exploit binaries.”

Before 9/11, there was an individual by the name of Khalid al-Mihdhar, who came to be one of the principal hijackers. He was being tracked by the intelligence agencies in the Far East. They lost track of him. At the same time, the intelligence agencies had identified an al-Qaeda safehouse in Yemen. They understood that that al-Qaeda safehouse had a telephone number, but they could not know who was calling into that particular safehouse.

We came to find out afterwards that the person who had called into that safehouse was al-Mihdhar, who was in the United States in San Diego. If we had had this program in place at the time, we would have been able to identify that particular telephone number in San Diego….[T]he opportunity was not there. If we had had this program that opportunity would have been there.

The New Orleans Advocate recently published a shocking story that details the very real threats to privacy and civil liberties posed by law enforcement access to private genetic databases and familial DNA searching.

In 1996, a young woman named Angie Dodge was murdered in her apartment in a small town in Idaho. Although the police collected DNA from semen left at the crime scene, they haven’t been able to match the DNA to existing profiles in any criminal database, and the murder has never been solved.